By Harry Nara · Last updated
Choose Your Season
Broader overviews covering weather patterns, events, and highlights across an entire season.
Plan by Month
Each month at a glance — temperature, crowds, and one click to the full guide.
Events & Festivals
Dates, where to watch, and what each one actually costs.
A Year That Turns on Rain, Not Temperature
Mexico City sits more than 2,200 metres above sea level, and the altitude does something visitors rarely expect: it flattens the year. Average highs move barely five degrees between the coolest month and the warmest, so the calendar here is not divided by temperature in any useful sense. It is divided by rain, and that division is close to absolute, with nine tenths of the year’s water falling inside six months.
The Dry Season (November to April)
Six months of reliably clear skies, cool nights and almost no rain at all; December averages a single wet day in the entire month. This is when the city is easiest to walk, and it holds both of its largest occasions, Día de Muertos at the start of November and the Guadalupe feast in December. One thing the season’s name hides: April is the hottest month of the whole year, hotter than anything the rains produce, and it sits at the peak of the ozone season.
The Wet Season (May to October)
Rain here is an afternoon event rather than a condition. Mornings open clear through most of the season, the storms arrive late in the day and pass, and the valley is green in a way the dry months never show. July and August are the wettest on the calendar at around twenty wet days each, and they are also cooler than April, which surprises people.
The Quiet Months Are the Wet Ones
June, July and August are rated low for crowds, as is January, and they are the cheapest months of the year. November is the opposite: it is the single peak month, because Día de Muertos falls in the first days of it. The useful detail is that the crowd leaves around the fifth while the weather stays, which makes the back three weeks of November the best-value fortnight the city has.
Our Mexico City Guides
Fourteen guides covering both seasons and all twelve months, and the event pages beside them, treating the altitude, the afternoon storms and a dense festival calendar as the three things that shape a trip here.